Elisabeth Edley's father has three skeletons in his closet. One is aged taupe and named Olivia. The second has a dent in the skull and has been donned A.P. The third is a photograph of a blonde, dead girl.
~ A five part story that I wrote for my Cre...
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For a time, I removed the memory of the photo from my mind. I had learned to forget things that caused me pain.
I kept Angela's bear in my closet, on the highest shelf. Sometimes paranoia captured me as I lied awake at night, and I would swear to myself that it watched my thoughts.
The bear had been from Angela's father. She took it everywhere she went with her, a piece of him. He had been stationed Iraq. He was her best friend before she went missing. Maybe if she was still out there somewhere, she still thought of him everyday. I knew he thought of her.
She asked me to keep it a secret that day in seventh grade when she first brought it to school. She kept it in her backpack, beneath all of her binders and pencils. It was important to her, and now it's home was the dampness and the darkness of my closet.
I didn't want to think about how the bear had gotten there in the first place. This vision kept running through my mind.
It was her and her faceless kidnapper, and he had grabbed her, and he was taking her away. And she had been holding her bear, her favorite bear, her only piece of hope, and he gripped her so roughly that she dropped it. It fell to the dirt floor. Gone to her, maybe forever.
And then she was gone. Gone to me, maybe forever.
The storms didn't stop. The spring was so gray and so rainy that I felt like the pressure of the clouds was a trap on my back. Despite the weather, I still walked home everyday. Waylon sauntered on the other side of the street, as usual. The concrete street we had grown up on was a barrier between us, it always had been, but now it felt different.
He hadn't looked at me once since that night. Part of me wanted him to look me in the eye and tell me that it was going to be okay. The other half wanted him to stay far away, because he was a reminder of my newborn problems.
I hardly talked to anyone for a while. I shut myself into my room. I wanted to be alone, but I also hated it. When I was left to loneliness that was my existence, I thought about the things I had been trying to erase for years.
As I laid in my bed some days, as the rain pounded against my window, I stared up at the glow in the dark stars my mother had pasted up when I was a little girl. Their spaces and their corners transported me back to what felt like a movie, and the precipitation was its soundtrack.
"There's a monster in this house Momma," I declare.
I am eight and I am small. Momma is my whole world.
She sighs at me, standing in my bedroom doorway, "There are no monsters here, Lissie."
"Yes there are," I argue. "They live in my closet and in the corners and down the hallway, even in your room Momma!"
My whole world shakes her head, but she is smiling, "Monsters don't exist, darling."
I open my mouth to disagree once more, but she hushes me with a look.
